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3 Responses

As Lesley and Martijn have said, these two URLs constitute duplicate content because anyvariation to a URL that resolves the same page is, to Google, a brand new page with identical content.

Technically the canonical root URL should probably be simply http://www.flagshipsd.com/flagship-cruises-ships/weddings-and-receptions.

http://www.flagshipsd.com/flagship-cruises-ships/weddings-and-receptions?optify_r=FBG&optify_rd=Twitter and http://www.flagshipsd.com/flagship-cruises-ships/weddings-and-receptions?optify_r=FBG should contain a canonical tag pointing to http://www.flagshipsd.com/flagship-cruises-ships/weddings-and-receptions. This will take care of the problem and Moz will no longer flag these as duplicated. The process of doing this should be easy for a web developer - he or she will add the tag to the source code of the Wedding & Receptions page, meaning that it will appear on every "version" of that page that pops up under different URLs. The same needs to apply to the entire site, so parameters on other URLs don't create the same problem.

One thing that's odd though is that the canonical URL (http://www.flagshipsd.com/flagship-cruises-ships/weddings-and-receptions) has a descriptive title tag: "San Diego Wedding Cruises - San Diego Wedding Venue - Flagship Cruises & Events". The duplicate versions have a title tag simply reading "Weddings". I am not sure why this would have happened but it's a question for the person in charge of web dev.

When using a tracking code like that you should also be using a canonical url on the page as well. Because the two addresses will appear to be different pages to a crawler, but the tracking code is the only thing different in reality. So a search engine will not know which page to rank, that is why you use the canonical to tell the search engine which page you want ranked.

The tracking code is correct, but the only thing Moz is looking at is just checking if the percentage of the source code that matches up across two files is higher than a certain percentage. If it is it will report as duplicate content.

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